This invention relates to capacitors, and in particular 3- and 4-terminal capacitors.
Reference is made to a co-pending patent application "HIGH CURRENT, LOW INDUCTANCE CAPACITOR PACKAGES, Ser. No. 08/840424 filed Apr. 29, 1997; U.S. Pat. No. 5,659,455 "PACKAGING FOR ELECTRONIC CIRCUITS USING A CAPACITOR AS A STRUCTURAL MEMBER", issued Apr. 19, 1997; and to U.S. Pat. No. 4,916,576, "MATRIX CAPACITOR", filed Feb. 27, 1989 and issued Apr. 10, 1990.
3- and 4-terminal capacitors are sometimes used to reduce the effects of "lead inductance" in a capacitor. As an example, not a limitation, they may be used in low-pass filtering applications, such as the input and output filter capacitors in switched mode power supplies. A feed-through capacitor can be considered to be a kind of a 3-terminal capacitor.